John Young @jsy1001@qoto.org

Prepping for the next Rare Earth (on cultivated meat), & remembered the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland so looked up Mock Turtle Soup. And now I wish I hadn't:

"Mock turtle soup is an English soup that was created in the mid-18th century as an imitation of green turtle soup. It often uses brains and organ meats such as calf's head to duplicate the texture and flavour of the original's turtle meat after the green turtles used to make the original dish were hunted nearly to extinction. "

Ugh

[ANN] Emergency bugfix release: Org mode 9.7.5

I just released Org mode 9.7.5 that fixes a critical vulnerability.
The release is coordinated with emergency Emacs 29.4 release.

Please upgrade your Org mode *and* Emacs ASAP.

The vulnerability involves arbitrary Shell code evaluation when
previewing attachments in Emacs MUA (gnus-based: at least, mu4e,
Notmuch, Gnus itself) or when opening third-party Org files. All the
earlier versions of Org mode are affected.

Note that the vulnerability solved in this release has nothing to do
with recent Org 9.6.23 release. It existed since
long time ago and was discovered by accident.

Original announcement: https://list.orgmode.org/87sex5gdqc.fsf@localhost/T/#u

#orgmode #announcement

For astronomers missing #SPIE by coming to #Leiden for Exoplanets 5, you can get your #astroninstrumentation fix by visiting the Boerhaave museum and amongst the science exhibits, you can see several lenses hand ground by the Huygens brothers from the 1600’s 🔭🪐 #astrodon #exo5 https://rijksmuseumboerhaave.nl/

Soon the telescope platform at ESO's Paranal Observatory in #Chile will look very different at night: all four of the 8.2 m telescopes of the VLT will be equipped with lasers! This is one of the ongoing upgrades of the GRAVITY+ instrument, which will allow us to study black holes, stars and planets like never before.

Find out more in this great article by current and former ESO communication interns Elena Reiriz Martinez and Tom Howarth: https://www.eso.org/public/blog/gravity-leap-vlti/

#astrodon #astronomy #technology

Astronomers who build instruments and publish in #SPIE journals - please post the preprints on #arXiv as well! #astrodon #astroinstrumentation

Before I head off on a trip to various parts of not-Barcelona, I thought I’d share a somewhat provocative paper by David Hogg and Soledad Villar. In my capacity as journal editor over the past few years I’ve noticed that there has been a phenomenal increase in astrophysics papers discussing applications of various forms of Machine Leaning (ML). This paper looks into issues around the use of ML not just in astrophysics but elsewhere in the natural sciences.

The abstract reads:

Machine learning (ML) methods are having a huge impact across all of the sciences. However, ML has a strong ontology – in which only the data exist – and a strong epistemology – in which a model is considered good if it performs well on held-out training data. These philosophies are in strong conflict with both standard practices and key philosophies in the natural sciences. Here, we identify some locations for ML in the natural sciences at which the ontology and epistemology are valuable. For example, when an expressive machine learning model is used in a causal inference to represent the effects of confounders, such as foregrounds, backgrounds, or instrument calibration parameters, the model capacity and loose philosophy of ML can make the results more trustworthy. We also show that there are contexts in which the introduction of ML introduces strong, unwanted statistical biases. For one, when ML models are used to emulate physical (or first-principles) simulations, they introduce strong confirmation biases. For another, when expressive regressions are used to label datasets, those labels cannot be used in downstream joint or ensemble analyses without taking on uncontrolled biases. The question in the title is being asked of all of the natural sciences; that is, we are calling on the scientific communities to take a step back and consider the role and value of ML in their fields; the (partial) answers we give here come from the particular perspective of physics

arXiv:2405.18095

P.S. The answer to the question posed in the title is obviously “yes”.

https://telescoper.blog/2024/05/30/is-machine-learning-good-or-bad-for-the-natural-sciences/

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #arXiv240518095 #Astrophysics #Cosmology #DataScience #deepLearning #MachineLearning

Coolest video I've seen today: an electronic scanner-paint plotter from 1970!

Who called it “code review” instead of “objection-oriented programming”

Well, this seems to be an interesting and unexpected big deal: a new paper suggests that light can evaporate water without actually needing to heat the water up first. And it could sort out a few problems in existing cloud physics:

https://news.mit.edu/2024/how-light-can-vaporize-water-without-heat-0423

#physics #water

Neat! Gaia spots a 33 solar mass black hole in the Milky Way!

https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/iow_20240416

BH3 matches what is quite common in our gravitational-wave observations, but had yet to be discovered in our own galaxy

Paper: https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202449763

#Astrodon

For anyone who still thinks that biofuels are going to be better than electrification, here's a couple of statistics from the World Resources Institute:

- Producing just 2% of the world's energy needs from liquid biofuel would require agricultural production to increase by another 30% by 2050.
- Even on the best lands, a hectare of modern solar voltaics can generate 40-100 times more usable energy than biomass

Here's how we use our land already.There just isn't room for that.

#climate #energy

The death of Peter Higgs is sad news. I remember him being in the green room at the Cheltenham Science Festival years ago, and he was so humble and polite to everyone. Dara Ó Briain (the comedian) was there, and he'd brought an empty jam jar with a hand-written label that said "this jar contains 1 Higgs Boson. Certified by... " and he got Peter Higgs to sign the bottom. (apparently that's the average number present). The jam jar made everyone very happy.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/09/peter-higgs-physicist-who-discovered-higgs-boson-dies-aged-94

This quote by Carl Sagan hangs in my office. #science

I'm giving a public talk on "When Worlds Collide!" at 13:00 today (monday) at the Tūranga Library as part of the #ExSSV Extreme Solar Systems - come for the animations and rampant speculation, stay to read books!

https://christchurch.bibliocommons.com/events/65f33bde2038232f007d6948

Physicists have begun to explore the #proton as if it were a #subatomic planet.

Cutaway maps display newfound details of the particle’s interior.

The proton’s core features pressures more intense than in any other known form of #matter.

Halfway to the surface, clashing vortices of force push against each other.

And the “planet” as a whole is smaller than previous experiments had suggested.

#physics #particle
https://www.quantamagazine.org/swirling-forces-crushing-pressures-measured-in-the-proton-20240314/

I love this picture comparing different telescopes. Space telescopes are sexy - but the really big telescopes are down here. The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope is so big you might miss it: 100 meters across. Unfortunately the European Southern Observatory wimped out and decided to build a merely Extremely Large Telescope instead.

Radio telescopes are even bigger. The 305-meter dish at Arecibo is famous. In November 2020 scientist decided to shut it down after it was damaged by a hurricane and two earthquakes, and two important cables snapped. In December of that year more cables snapped and the support structure, antenna, and dome assembly all fell into the dish, destroying the whole thing.

Luckily in 2016 the Chinese had built an even larger radio dish in Guizhou: the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope or FAST. It's the largest one shown here. But in Russia there's a radio telescope 576 meters across - not a dish, but a bunch of separate structures.

And then there's the xkcd cartoon....

(1/2)

I took this pic quite a few years ago at ESO's Paranal Observatory in #Chile. It shows the #MilkyWay arching over the entrance to the Residencia, the site's partially underground lodging and my home in the Atacama Desert for many hundreds of nights!

Right at the centre there's the Coalsack Nebula, known to the Mapuche people of south-central Chile as pozoko (water well) and to the Incas as yutu (a bird similar to a partridge).

#astrodon #astronomy #astrophotography

@astro_jcm @kilian_muller Sure! thanks, Juan... okay, so the two amazing pieces of tech are (i) Adaptive Optics, which is where 'take the twinkle out of the star' by measuring the distortion put in by the Earth's turbulent atmosphere with a fast frame rate camera and removing it with a deformable mirror in the instrument. The other tech is that we use 'polarization' to see the disk. Star light is unpolarized, but star light bouncing from the disk becomes strongly polarised....